'A City Within a City' is a case study of the civil rights era as it happened in smaller cities, focusing specifically on the struggles involving school integration and bureaucratic reforms in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The efforts to dismantle structures of racial inequality had a very different flavour in smaller northern cities than they did in other parts of the north, and Robinson's book adds a new dimension to our understanding of how the civil rights movement operated in a part of the country that has only recently become an object of focus among historians.